Susabelle posted earlier today about the release of Firefox 3 next week. I am wondering whether Flash will work properly now and end my extreme frustration. Since at least January I have had the intermitent problem that many other firefox users have had where flash video will play for 2 seconds then stop. The only way to get out of this is to stop and start firefox and then things start working again. Very annoying when you have a lot of tabs open, so I have taken to killing the process so that I can use the auto recover feature to get back to exactly where I was. This all takes time though, often longer than the video clip I have been unable to watch.
I have also found that sites with flash embedded apps (Slashdot in particular) will sometimes slow ff down so much it needs to be killed which I think may be related. The issue I have with Firefox is that the problem has been around for nearly 6 months, it is prevelant and hardly a secret, yet there seems to be nobody from Mozilla or Adobe taking it seriously enough to work on it. If they are doing anything they are being awfully quiet about it. The problem apparently goes away if you downgrade to an earlier version of Flash 9, which tells me that it should be relatively easy to narrow down what causes the problem to the changes made between those versions, and back out whichever is the culprit.
Although they are not being blatent about it, there is a tone on the support forums that Adobe and Mozilla each believe it is the others problem. What should be happening is the two companies working together to fix this. Flash video is a very small part of my web browsing time so for me the issue has only been a mild annoyance so far. With a major update I am expecting this to be addressed however. What happens with this issue will be a big indicator as to the maturity of the Mozilla support model, which is a big factor in the corporate sector supporting use of firefox on corporate workstations.
If you are experiencing this issue yourself here are some helpful links
Mozillazine support forum thread 1
Mozillazine support forum thread 2
Mozillazine Knowledge Base article
Firefox support forum thread
Adobe support forum thread